Kate Winkler Dawson Books in Order

Kate Winkler Dawson writes historical true crime with a reporter's eye and a producer's sense of pace. Her books move through smoggy London streets, early forensic labs, New England farmyards, and haunted English houses, but they all start with the same impulse: go back to the record, ask better questions, and see what earlier investigators missed.

Austin has long been part of her story.

Dawson studied broadcast journalism at Boston University. While still in school, she worked on political coverage in Boston and spent her final semester in London reporting for United Press International. That stretch in London mattered. She fell for the city's history, and years later that interest helped lead her to the case at the center of Death in the Air.

Before she wrote full-length narrative nonfiction, she spent almost 25 years in television news. Her work took her from local stations in Austin to WCBS in New York, ABC News Radio, and Fox News, including time in San Francisco covering national stories. She also made documentaries, earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, and taught at Fordham before joining the University of Texas at Austin. It is a very practical background, built on deadlines, field reporting, and figuring out what really happened.

After returning to Austin in 2005, she also became involved with the Actual Innocence Clinic started by her father.

That part of her career says a lot about the books. Dawson has written about helping journalism students and law students dig through files, court records, and prison interviews, and that habit of patient investigation runs through everything she does. She likes stories where the official version feels incomplete, especially when class, gender, or reputation shaped who got believed and who was forgotten.

That is exactly why Death in the Air works as more than a murder story. It braids the Great Smog of 1952 with the murders committed by John Reginald Christie, so the book becomes a wider look at public failure, fear, and the way vulnerable people disappear twice, first in life and then in the record. Readers who click with Dawson usually like that mix: strong archive work, a clear voice, and a refusal to treat old cases as sealed and settled just because a century has passed.

American Sherlock pushed further into the history of forensic science, following Edward Oscar Heinrich as he helped turn detective work into something more systematic, and sometimes more dangerous. In All That Is Wicked, Dawson examines Edward Rulloff, a gifted and deeply violent killer, and the nineteenth-century experts who tried to explain what made him so frightening. Even The Ghost Club, her shorter audio original about Harry Price, Borley Rectory, and supernatural investigation in London, fits the same pattern. Belief meets evidence. The evidence gets messy.

Her newer book The Sinners All Bow returns to the 1832 death of Sarah Maria Cornell and the scandal around Reverend Ephraim Avery. It also brings in Catharine Read Arnold Williams, whose account of the case is often described as America's first true crime book, and traces the story's connection to the world that helped inspire The Scarlet Letter. That angle feels very Dawson, because she is just as interested in who tells the story as she is in the crime itself.

Outside the books, Dawson has built a big presence in audio. She created Tenfold More Wicked, hosts Wicked Words, and cohosts Buried Bones with Paul Holes. The move makes sense. She came up in broadcast, and she understands how pacing, atmosphere, and a well-timed detail can pull a listener deeper into the past. These days she is based in Austin, teaches journalism at the University of Texas, and keeps moving between classroom, microphone, and archive.